Over the years we have seen Ubisoft sagas change for the better, among them Watch Dogs, born at the beginning of the generation that is about to come to an end and is preparing to welcome the new one.
After having lived the stories of two heroes, Aiden e Marcus, the developers decided that narrative footprint was no longer good.
From the first announcement one thing has always been clear: we will have the opportunity to play with each character, each of this has its own story to accomplish the only goal of the activists.
Despite some doubts, thanks to Ubisoft who provided us with a copy of the title, we are here today to tell you about this new formula adopted by the French developer. Will he have managed to get a good score?
Conquering London Bridge
The goal of our desperate heroes is to rebuild the now gone DedSec, with the aim of ridding the world of corruption through their hacking systems.
Unfortunately, however, during the most important operation in the city of London, our group is blocked by another team of hackers, called Zero-Day, who conquered the entire city and framed the DedSec, charging them guilty for a serious accident.
Although there are some main characters, the title at the beginning will make us choose our first hero, automatically generated by the game.
It will immediately throw us into the fray to regain lost power and push the people to rebel against the dark technology that is dominating London. The world is dominated by technology, there is nothing that is not done without the help of the latter, eliminating all those things that made "the human" necessary.
Revolt not excellent
At the center of the story there is a revolt against the excessive evolution of the world, which replace in almost everything the physical strength of the human. In some it reminded us of a scenario of B, quite known and discussed series that has often underlined this context with some of its episodes.
Unfortunately, the lack of a true background protagonist makes itself felt in an excessive way, the story is full of defects and allows itself to be followed but it is difficult to shake off the monotony and the clichés.
We liked the darker tones than the ones from Teen Revolution di Watch Dogs 2, but unfortunately fails to manage the entire vein to the end. The narrative turns are many, but the direction taken by the Ubisoft Team is very uncertain, taking on an annoying redundancy in the long run.
Do you want to join my fraternity?
The mechanics of being able to play with every single character present in London are very interesting, since each of these will present an interesting background, not taken care of in the highest levels but the right one to allow you to have an idea of the character played.
Accompanying us are characters like Bagley, an AI in the service of DedSec and that often lends itself to some funny gags.
One of the main elements is to choose our members well. To recruit someone, it will be enough to register him with our mobile phone, and face his mission to understand how to marry him to the cause of our group of activists.
Each activist will have unique techniques available, which will allow us to overcome certain obstacles easily, such as the use of the drone and the mechanical specialty.
Some characters in addition to the bonuses will also have malus, such as the older characters who will have poor mobility, without the possibility of being able to take a shot in the most excited phases.
Partly functional structure
The city is much more alive in Watch Dogs: Legion, every step we take inside the city will allow us to meet key pieces for our team. We will also have to be careful about who we kill on the street, because we could deprive ourselves of enlisting certain citizens, who perhaps had techniques that were very useful for our cause.
Our heroes will not have a great deal of paraphernalia as in the past, but a more "physical" approach has been preferred, improving the playability of the melee with a series of combos that can be carried out during close encounters.
As for the weapons, we can often have non-lethal ones, through the technology menu that can be acquired only by spending the relative coin (obtainable during the course of exploration). The mouths of fire will be only the peculiarities of some characters, who will have the latter in their abilities.
The level design is of the highest quality, modeled to adapt to the vertical structure of the game, in order to allow any approach with our heroes. In addition, there are more elements that will give us the opportunity to approach in multiple ways for a given mission.
In some sections it opens and lends itself to completely platform sections, making the most of the game environments. Often climbing a building will be a real challenge, because we will have more ways to do it and as many difficulties to reach the top.
Technically a disaster
Unfortunately, not everything is perfect, to give up is also the design of the characters, often with recycled assets and quite similar to each other, a predictable threshold since it will be possible to play with everyone.
At the same time, technical problems also put a spoke in the wheel of production, we found ourselves having to restart the game several times due to freezes and crashes. The day one patch solved some of the problems, but it wasn't enough to fill the flaws.
We felt some drop in framerate during the most hectic phases and while driving, which in turn caused other application crashes. Even the Italian dubbing is not of good quality, the voices are often assigned in an "anomalous" way and the lack of audio files is a disaster, it will often be difficult to hear the voices, not to mention the delay in the lip.
Final Comment
We would have expected something more from Watch Dogs: Legion, but above all that he would have succeeded in dismissing our initial concerns. Unfortunately this was not the case, despite the new way of living history, the title suffers from major technical problems and limits on the current generation.
The narrative is interesting, but it is a more of the same at a certain point, finding an annoying redundancy. The level design is the best characterized element of the entire production. Sure it is a game that manages to entertain, but fails to excel due to its number of flaws. Our advice is to approach the title with the advent of the next-gen, to avoid running into technical problems of any kind.
